Thomas Merton on Solitude

The American Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-68) was a prolific
writer on a variety of subjects but known especially for his
popularization of the monastic life and for his advocacy -- unique
among American writers and religious -- of eremiticism. In the
twenty short years of his life as a writer, beginning with his
autobiographical Seven Storey Mountain in 1948, Merton published
over sixty books and pamphlets, over five hundred articles and
contributions to books, plus translation and poetry. He composed
private journals and maintained a voluminous personal
correspondence, and also recorded his classroom lectures. The public
writings are consistent and constructive, with a definable
trajectory that established his well-read and reflective mind. After
his death, with publication of private journals and correspondence,
a more controversial and iconoclastic figure emerged, one dubbed
contradictory by both fellow monks and outside observers.

The private Merton does not impinge upon the integrity of
Merton's writings on monasticism, eremiticism, and solitude. Because
the published works so clearly represent his intended reflections,
and because the same themes underlie his work even through the
evolution of his ideas, what follows draws entirely on the public
Merton.

We can identify several phases of thought in Merton, with
the transitions and overlap that occurred between them. They are
cumulative phases, spirals absorbing the best of the previous
period, sometimes anticipating the next period. They are not
strictly linear. Roughly put,
these are as follows, with representative book titles and their year
of publication, considering that the time from manuscript to to
printing date could vary months or even years.

1948-51.Traditional defense of monasticism in the modern
world.Seven Storey Mountain (1948), Seeds of Contemplation
(1949), The Waters of Siloe (1949), Ascent to Truth (1951),
The
Sign of Jonas (1953), No Man is an Island (1955).

1951-1959.From tradition defense to using the vocabulary
and concepts of existentialism and personalism; strong advocacy of
eremiticism.The Silent Life (1956); Basic Principles of
Monastic Spirituality (1957); Thoughts in Solitude (1958);
Disputed Questions (1960).

1960-1965.
Social and political concerns; confidence in philosophical
defense of solitude.Wisdom of the Desert (1960); The New Man
(1962); New Seeds of Contemplation (1962); Conjectures of a Guilty
Bystander (1965); Contemplation in a World of Action (1965);
Raids
on the Unspeakable (1965).

During what
we have called his first phase (1948-51), Merton was strongly
influenced by Thomist scholasticism, and defended the Catholic
Church's historical context for monasticism. Merton presented
monasticism in an original and contemporary lights, as an
alternative to the modern materialistic cultures of post-World War
II: capitalism and communism. Here he followed figures such as
Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain in maintaining a benign optimism.

Even in his early years of conversion and the decision to enter
monastic life, Merton expressed an interest in the Carthusian order,
which has an official status for hermits. Because he became a monk
in 1941, access to the Carthusian order headquartered in France, was
impossible, though in 1953, Merton was to float the suggestion of
transfer to his abbot but was to be politely turned back. Hence even
in these earliest years, Merton was strongly attracted to
eremiticism and solitude. In part his was a reaction of
disappointment. Merton had found monastery at Gethsemani
overcrowded, busy, highly ritualized, and noisy -- the opposite of
an atmosphere conducive to contemplation.

With publication of Seven
Storey Mountain and ordination to priesthood, Merton was afforded a
reclusive corner of the monastery library for writing. But despite
the popularity of his first books, some critics viewed them as a romanticized
portrait of monastic life. By 1951, when he became Master of
Scholastics at Gethsemani, and the criticism of his Ascent to
Truth, Merton realized that his scholastic
definitions of contemplation and spirituality were abstract and even
cold, not serving to resolve his new sensibilities nor effectively
communication to his popular audience. This set the stage for the
second phase.

PHASE TWO (1951-59)

Merton was strongly impressed by an issue of the French journal
La vie spirituelle (October 1952) dedicated to "Blessed Solitude"
and by Max Picard's The World of Silence, Merton's introduction to
Christian existentialism and a resource for the rest of his life. In
1953-54, Merton composed Thoughts in Solitude (not published until
1958), and a preface to Jean Leclerq's book on the Renaissance
hermit Paul Giustiniani. This preface signaled Merton's definitive
defense of hermits in the monastic tradition.

The true reason for the persistence of hermits even in ages
which are most hostile to the solitary ideal is that the
exigencies of Christian life demand that there be hermits. The
kingdom of God would be incomplete without them,. for they are men
who seek God alone with the most absolute and underrated and
uncompromising singleness of heart.

In 1955, Merton wrote Dans la desert de Dieu, a work on
solitude privately printed only in French and Italian. About this time,
several religious authorities supported Merton's position on
solitude and his newest petition to transfer to the Camaldolese --
Jean Leclerq being the most prominent -- but the Abbot Visitor of
the Order cracked down on what he considered an eremitic mentality
at Gethsemani. The abbot James Fox gave Merton the alternative (to
his petition) of manning the nearby State Forestry Department
watchtower. But Merton, like the biblical Jonas, wavered, and when the Master of
Novices post opened, he accepted it quietly. A few days later, a letter from
the Sacred Congregation for Religious (in the Vatican) arrived with
denial for his request to transfer to the Camaldolese.

In his second period, Merton's experience in contemporary
monasticism had revealed the weakness of its modern-day
spirituality, and he begins developing the theme of solitude not
only as a basis for monks to separate from society (as in phase one)
but for the spiritual development of individual monks for whom
eremiticism can be an option.

As long as the solitary life is systematically played down,
discouraged, and even forbidden, I do not think that even the
cenobitic [sic] life will bear its proper fruit.

Towards the end of this period, Merton
makes the shift from solitude for monks to solitude for laity.

Not all men are called to be hermits, but all men need enough
silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice
of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally. ... For he
cannot go on happily for long, unless he is in contact with the
springs of spiritual ilife which are hidden in the depths of this
own true soul.

It
was in the middle of this period that Merton made his request to
transfer to the Camaldolese, but also the period during which he
evolved a precise defense of eremiticism and solitude.

Where the writings of the first phase were a traditional defense
of monasticism against the world, the writings of this second phase
incorporate a greater compassion for "the world" and the plight of
people. Merton is clearly familiar with a range of writings echoed
in his new vocabulary: alienation, the absurd, the "stranger," mass
man, and the need for psychological integration.

Note that the word 'alienation' is used by non-existentialists to
support the fictions of collective life. For them the 'alienated'
man is the one who is not at peace in the general myth. He is the
non-conformist; the oddball who does not agree with everybody else
and who disturbs the pleasant sense of collective rightness. For the
existentialist, the alienated man is the one who, though 'adjusted'
to society, is alienated from himself. The inner life of the mass
man, alienated and leveled in the existential sense, is a dull
collective routine of popular fantasies maintained in existence by
the collective dreams that goes on , without interruption, in the
mass media.

Merton distinguishes
the individual from the person, and criticizes socialization into
materialism and hostility towards solitude. The compassion for
suffering humanity is joined by the prescription of solitude,
unmasking of the false self built up by the contrivances of society
against the true self. The true self is discovered only in the solitude of
self and the solitude of God.

The real wilderness of the hermit is the wilderness of the human
spirit which is at once his and everyone else's. What he seeks in
that wilderness is not himself, not human company, and consolation,
but God.

Man's loneliness is, in fact, the loneliness of God. This is why
it is such a great thing for a man to discover his solitude and
learn to live in it. For there he finds that he and God are one:
that God is aloneness as he himself is alone. That God wills to be
alone in man.

Though he was afforded intervals of solitude on the quarters of
the monastery, Merton petitioned the Congregation for Religious for
exclaustration in 1959, hoping to go to Mexico as a hermit near a
Benedictine monastery. When this plan failed, Merton cast his eye on
a free-standing block building planned for conference guests. This
he dubbed "St. Anne's Hermitage." Here he was destined to enjoy
his dwelling, first for hours at a time, then days, then, in
1965, indefinitely.

Merton's Notes for a Philosophy of Solitude published in
the book Disputed
Questions, is undoubtedly his best essay on solitude. The core of
the work was written as Dans le desert de Dieu referred to earlier
(and never published in English), such an explicit praise of
eremiticism that Merton had anticipated the reaction of the censors
by not even trying to present it for publication. This essay, with
the contents of The Solitary Life, was
expanded into Notes,
initially refused by the censors who forced Merton through three revisions
before permitting its inclusion in Disputed Questions.

In
fact, the revisions of Notes broadened the theme for readers of every
station in life, eliminating the words "monk" and "hermit" for
"solitary," and calling upon readers to recognize their unique
personhood outside of any institutional framework. In solitude the
person discovers the commonality of all people and the solitude of
God. This was the new focus for the next phase.

Ours is certainly a time for solitaries and hermits. But merely
to reproduce the simplicity, austerity, and prayer of these
primitive souls is not a complete or satisfactory answer. We must
transcend them ...

PHASE THREE (1960-65)

Merton's productivity accelerated. He took the trajectory of his
second phase to new treatments of spiritual life, applying
contemplation as a tool to be combined with practical life. This
everyday life meant experiencing the reality of people in society,
hence Merton's addressing social and political issues such as war,
racism, poverty, and violence. Part of this
new phase was an increase in articles and essays versus books, more
timely and critical in perspective than a leisurely and reflective monograph. His increasing respites of solitude helped.

In a 1964 meeting of North and South American Cistercian
abbots at Gethsemani, Merton circulated an essay urging
consideration of greater provision for solitude in monasteries, even
as hermitages of lauras attached to monasteries. The essay was not
just self-serving, though born of practical experience. Merton
followed up with detailed mechanics of how such lauras would function.

Shortly afterwards, Merton received permission to stay at St. Anne's as
its hermit.

PHASE FOUR (1965-68)

In a letter to Dorothy Day in 1965, Merton wrote that he could
not be both an activist for social and political issues and a
hermit. He preferred the latter, and the fourth phase shows this
direction definitively

You will never find interior solitude unless you make some
conscious effort to deliver yourself from the desires and the cares
and the attachments of an existence in time and in the world.

In the solitude of his new hermitage, Merton continued the pace of writing,
but with a new emphasis on the historical Christian mystics and on
Taoist and Buddhist thought, seeing solitude in the context of enlightenment.
The correspondence with a variety of spiritual figures and scholars
from Sufism to Zen was invaluable.

As an example referring to Christian mysticism but reflecting his
use of Eastern thought, Merton writes:

This dynamic of emptying and of transcendence accurately defines
the transformation of the Christian consciousness in Christ. It is a
kenotic transformation, an emptying of all the contents of the
ego-consciousness in order to become a void in which the light of
God or the glory of God, the full radiation of the infinite reality
of His Being and Love are manifested.

Two issues
not directly related to publishing had an impact on his life: the
apparent indifference and occasional hostility of the Gethesemani
monks towards eremiticism, and the growing lack of privacy
surrounding Merton's daily life. Merton was sensitive to and hurt by
the former, but ambivalent about the latter, thriving on personal
contacts but regretting the disruptions to his solitude. In 1968, he
considered relocating to a Trappist monastery in California, or
even, Alaska, being given permission for the first time to
travel.

That spring, Merton gave lectures at the Our Lady of the
Redwoods in California, finding the experience invigorating. That
fall, he pursued the invitation to speak at a conference of
Asian monastic leaders in Bangkok, Thailand. He considered this an
opportunity to explore other venues for solitude as much as a chance
to deepen his concept of the monastic life. We know from his
posthumous journals, for example, that he was enthusiastic about the Dalai Lama's
advice to read the metaphysics of the Vajrayana school. Merton died in Bangkok,
accidentally electrocuted by a faulty fan in his room.

SUMMARY

The trajectory of Merton's thoughts on solitude may be summarized
thusly: It begins in a withdrawal from the world (as a religious) in
order to witness against the corruption and materialism the world
embodies. It is first a physical solitude. The trajectory then
returns to the world with compassion for those who suffer society's
oppression and alienation, and constructs a defense of the person
who is unable to withdraw from the world, an assertion of personhood
and the true self. This phase culminates in a radical critique of
the society that has perpetrated its oppressive values on the
person. But in order to safeguard solitude, the trajectory
rediscovers its spiritual fruits, and transcends the world in order
to pursue for wisdom and enlightenment.